Folsom Street will return to its pre-'right-sizing' design between Canyon and Spruce

Cassie Slade, of he Fox Tuttle Hernandez Transportation Group, checks the flow rate of cars southbound through the intersection of Folsom Street and Canyon Boulevard on Tuesday evening to help test the effects of the "right-sizing" changes on traffic. (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)

Boulder City Council members criticized the community for the vitriolic tone of emails they had received from both sides of the "right-sizing" issue, before backing a transportation staff recommendation to remove protected bike lanes and return to four lanes of vehicle traffic on four blocks of Folsom Street.

"It's hard to go to sleep at night because you've been insulted so badly," Councilwoman Mary Young said Tuesday night. "I feel like I'm living among a bunch of people who feel entitled to their own without consideration for others. I want you to think about that."

Councilwoman Lisa Morzel, who pushed for the city to roll back the right-sizing project, said the tone of the debate had set back the cause of bicycle infrastructure, and she criticized bicycle advocates dressed in black who were tweeting about the meeting from the front row.

"My concern with all this vitriol is that it pushes everyone into their own corners and it pushes us backwards, and we can't make progress on bike and pedestrian safety," she said.

But Morzel rejected the idea that the city is "abandoning" the Folsom project.

"That is not the case," she said.

Just a month before, a majority of council members supported continuing the project for at least a year with relatively minor changes — such as removing bollards, lengthening turn lanes and changing landscaping — and gathering data on how well it was working. The project was conceived as an experiment to try a street design that had been tried in many other cities to see how much it improved safety and bike ridership along the corridor.

Advertisement

But the project sparked an intense backlash from drivers who faced traffic jams, especially during the afternoon rush hour.

Go Boulder Manager Kathleen Bracke said the average delay was just 76 seconds on the southbound side, but travel times were highly variable and some trips took much longer.

Last week, city transportation staff members recommended returning that portion to four lanes because minor modifications had not made a noticeable difference in travel times, snow removal plans might not work well and businesses felt customers were being driven away.

The protected bike lanes on Folsom will remain from Pine Street north to Valmont Road, with the block between Pine and Spruce being a transition zone, and from Arapahoe Avenue south to Colorado Avenue.

Councilman Sam Weaver said the portions of the project that do the most to improve safety will remain. Traffic speeds are higher north of Pine, and cyclists will still benefit from protection there.

Councilman Andrew Shoemaker said right-sizing was an experiment, and it has worked as such in that the city learned a lot. He called the return to four vehicle lanes in the central part of the corridor a "minor tweak."

Councilman Tim Plass supported the staff recommendation but not without hesitation.

"By truncating this project, we're going to lose some really valuable data from that section of the road," he said. "I hope we find ways to redouble our efforts to meet our goals for bikes in the transportation master plan."

Councilwoman Suzanne Jones said she would "reluctantly" support the return to four vehicle lanes and said she hoped transportation planners would still bring forward innovative ideas, but with more public outreach beforehand.

"The direction is not to be less bold but perhaps to be more strategic," she said.

Bracke said the lessons learned on the Folsom Street corridor could be incorporated into design guidelines for bicycle lanes in other corridors.

Council members said the city should look at possible changes on 19th Street and 30th Street to improve bicycle safety along north-south corridors.

"The public is now on notice that we're going to do these interesting projects, and we want your input early on," Jones said.

The Boulder alt-country band gives its EPs names such as Death and Resurrection, and its songs bear the mark of hard truths and sin. But the punk energy behind the playing, and the sense that it's all in good fun, make it OK to dance to a song like "Death." Full Story